Dead game franchises

[Herr Schatten]

Why should I care about some random mascot?

Care, don't care... doesn't affect me either way. I'm mentioning it for myself, and any others who enjoyed the games for the most part.

I think the first game is utterly brilliant, while all the follow-ups failed to come even close. Of the sequels, only Shinobi World was enjoyable, although a lot less than Miracle World.

I'd have loved to see Sega develop the gameplay further. If Miracle World was Sega's SMB1, just imagine how awesome their equivalent of SMB3 might have been. Enchanted Castle should have been Sega's SMW, instead it was an incoherent generic re-hash of the first game that got all the right things wrong and in addition had terrible controls. Unfortunately, they also seemed to care less about the gameplay of their 8 bit masterpiece than about the mascot, sticking poor Alex into all sorts of unrelated half-assed platform romps. It's the questionable quality of the sequels that effectively killed the franchise.

[captain ahar]

Mother-FUCKING Undying, hell yes.

I haven't gotten around to Jericho, hear it's a poor replacement though.

You don't know how disappointed I was to find out that Undying was planned as a series and the follow ups were never made because of poor sales. Fucking shameful. I played the demo of Jericho, seems like it has good ideas, but I don't know how well they executed it.

not very well implemented at all. the game was quite good looking, especially considering it was completely developed (engine and all) in house at some small potatoes spanish developer. and gameplay wise they could have been on to something barring a few foibles:

-retarded squad that could not keep themselves alive, most of your time spent is not fighting the good fight but resurrecting your squad mates with one of the two healers (one of whom sucked besides)

-retarded enemy a.i. they run towards you and occasionally fire on you (if they are carrying guns, that is) otherwise they have some kind of melee or proximity attack(s). some variation is introduced by enemies that get caught on the level geometry in the middle of a run animation and are left unable to attack at all

-for the big deal that the game made about having all these different characters with different abilities, very few of the characters were useful at all.

must say though, the game had some cool ideas being thrown around, particularly in how it handled the environmental changes (as you progress towards the epicenter of the "storm", the time period slips further and further back). this, coupled with the decent graphics work, made for some interesting sights.

i actually went through the trouble of pre-ordering this, due to my undying love of undying. it was a mistake.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Star Control series.